Virtual School routing around conventional ed systems

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”~ Buckminister Fuller

There’s a continuing push and pull between interests that want to confine “public educational financing” to public schools, and interests who want to use that public financing to support independent schools who are free to provide education according to their own particular vision of what education should be.

This isn’t new, as Parochial Schools have been around for a long time, and have often surpassed public schools in providing quality education in poverty areas, most often with little if any public financing involved.

What is different is the idea that dollars publicly aggregated through various sorts of taxes should support non public schools. Supporters of public schools accurately see that idea as eventually undermining public schools.

Non supporters of public schools have different reasons for trying to use public moneys for private schools. A large portion of the private school “choice” interests have religious interests in play; others on the conservative side of politics just want to wrest power from government, and see “school choice” as one way to do that.

But then there are others who have other reasons to “rout around” the established educational institutions who have been very very slow to innovate and adjust to changes in our world, especially in the area of EdTech. Bucky Fuller famously noted that educational change was desperately needed…back in 1962. (see subsequent post here)

Those “others” are a very mixed group of EdTech visionaries who have despaired of traditional public schools ever getting to where they need to get. Most often they are not aligned with the “school choice” politics, but in the inerests of change are willing to support public money for private schools, or at least for “Charter Schools”.

As AI advances rapidly, the divide over where public educational dollars should go, what they should be spent on, and who should have the power to make those decisions will only grow in disputatiousness between a broad spectrum of interests. Parents and teachers unions may find themselves opposed over radical changes in how we do public education in the US, especially when innovation is at stake.

Models such as Community Schools which put teachers and parents on the same side of the spending equation offer a more collaborative journey towards Ed Tech capabilities.